


because i could not stop for sand

by 24601lesbians



Series: because i could not stop for sand [1]
Category: Cobra Starship, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album), Fall Out Boy, Gym Class Heroes, My Chemical Romance, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Addiction, Alternate Universe – Killjoys, Better Living Industries, Bonding, Capture, Human Experimentation, Illiteracy, M/M, Multi, Muteness, Nonbinary Character, Rebellion, Torture, also pete and gabe are bros, frank n patrick are bros, nonbinary andy hurley, panic is super cute with grace it's ridiculous, trans kobra kid bc yes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-14
Updated: 2016-07-22
Packaged: 2018-06-07 08:03:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6795943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/24601lesbians/pseuds/24601lesbians
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kobra and Party are following the city's mutter of "get out and stay out," embracing the sand and maybe gathering a crew. Not on purpose. Maybe on purpose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> took all the interlude chapters out [jazz hands]

When she wakes up, she surveys the hollowed under-dumpbox for a second. Older brother, younger mind-melded boys, bitchy neighbor, three homeless shrugs. Her older brother exists and he had a name. She always insists that he had a name, but he doesn’t talk, and they can’t prove it. The laws against trashwise errand runners knowing how to read or write prevent her from learning a lot of him. The sister laws that regulate who deserves access to precious things like graphites and paint cut off another route. And there's no dirt to practice in; it's too clean even in the space beneath a dumpster. Every color is drained of life. Only the junk piles bleached of purpose are growing.

The twat in the corner always tells her that he’s blurring out, that he’ll disappear, but she knows he won’t. He’s just mute, not unresponsive. Mikey thinks that if the know-it-all had scars to match her brother’s, he wouldn’t be able to (want to?) talk either. Charming as all hell, she can remember those days too, from a distance. How he’d convince the rationspeople that he’d taken a shine to them. He could blush on command, kiss the extra cans of food right out of their hands.

When Mikey tries it on dealers and rats, it only works half the time. The blushing is real, and there’s convincing fumbling of words, but she can’t always get off the ground. She’s not patient enough to wait four deliveries to try to let her hands linger with theirs or to drop soft glances on them when she knows they’re looking at her. Too twitchy, too taken up in the risk, not believing herself feminine enough. Her eyes drop to the three cans she has. One and a half she saves for the boys practically tied together by fingertips, one and a half for her brother and herself. Some of them are just out to wait through the pattering of acid rain, so she doesn’t really give a fuck.

“We should run away, Nick.” He almost smiles, shakes his head. Mikey concedes that it doesn’t fit him at all anyway. “Thomas? That one’s not it either, huh?”

“‘That one’s not it either, huh?’” oozes from the corner. The crinkled up form of her brother extends his legs. He’s got full scope on the corner rat now. He’s had a lot of practice glaring at the aggressively mopey guy, but Mikey just nudges him so he won’t drop the day’s can. Not-Nick-Thomas-Coby-Tony-Gabe puffs out a bitchy little sound, but curls back up.

Ten minutes into being fully awake, she's got another little touch of fire about getting out. Leaving. She can't stand it anymore. Maybe they won't be able to handle the desert full-on, but the edge of the city has different tension and the occasional breeze, at the very least. She knows she'd smell the sand on the air. It would be a shift for the better as far as the smaller ones are concerned. Mikey just wants to clear the ground, somehow make something pure and sweep it clean herself, for satisfaction and sunlight.

 

Her first job as a message runner for the bigshots earned her a place to stay (read: hole in the wall) that she began renting out several long years ago. Staying at the trash bin in the slow times gets her fresher edibles, extra money to scrape toward the firsthand food, and access to whatever's dropped by passerby. A wire-eyed son of a bitch adopted her after her second week on her own. Now she's grown—thankfully up more than out, lean and tall and possessing an easy balance.

The nights that she spends away from the dumpbox worry him. She was maybe eight years at most in her first clap? Can’t really remember much of it because of the distance time puts between them. Mikey can fuzzily remember a drac grabbing at her arm after she stood in front of a doorway during a random check. It was accidental, and she was afraid, so she did everything she could with her hands and feet, flailing around until somebody else flew at the drac with her.

By now, though, she’s learned that fighting is best between the night hours and what belongs to the sun. At night, when the dracs are doubled and accompanied by enough vixens to flood the main drags, when the exterminators hunt down the street rats that have made it past the wall separating the pentagonal Outer City from the Lower City, any number of people above one is identified as _hazard_ unless the distance between them is less than three inches. Right before they start flocking back to their storage units, though, the smog thickens with actual fog and rears above the entire city. Mistiming when to come out leads to rumbles in the fog where people can’t tell that a zap is pointed at them until their body hits the ground.

Timing it right took her practice, but the money chips and tradeables from pools against her started flowing in, albeit a little bit choppily. The fights are quick and dirty, but the gamblers keep each other closer to honest. She gets a percentage if a majority of the betters are wrong. It’s so easy to play them; Mikey has her own little rotation planned out. The flow of people switching districts and skittering through the quarters means that she and her brother don’t have to move far to find fresh meat. She plays the underdog one night, but three nights later, she’s an over-cocky figure from the top of the food chain. The cycle goes on, and she has enough in her possession to move where she wants.

“Hey,” she starts quietly, when the rain has ceased.

He groans and flops his legs away. _What?_

“It’s about that time again.”

_I’ll take my own sweet time_ , his lazy stretch tells her.

Mikey stands and offers a hand to pull him up and all he does is flap a hand in her direction. She knows he’ll be up off the ground soon enough. She pulls together their two larger bags from where her torso was, then the smaller ones. Her brother makes sure that the weight is distributed well between the bags, then pushes one of each size back to her. Once he hauls himself up, they walk.

 

If their path comes too close to the Outer City, the watchers get trigger happy. If they stray too close to the desertside wall, the watchers get trigger happy. If they come too close to the centers for longer than a few blocks of crossover, they’ll get into more rumbles than it’s worth. After making it through several districts, the sky is almost done fading out, but it isn’t quite showing night yet. Mikey turns around the second he leaves her side. He's watching her with his head cocked slightly. _Why did we stop?_

"Wait, you wanted to go the whole...? I mean, we're not quite prepared. We are pretty close though," she adds, tapping her ring finger against her leg while she thinks. If she pushes enough, they can get out before the bazaar arrives and the layers of dracs are too heavy to deal with. She voices this to him and he stops casing the building next to them long enough to squeeze her hand twice, then tugs her inside.

It's rundown as fuck, with bare brick walls (grimy white) and a chilly black concrete floor with several holes. It doesn’t smell like any shrugs have been here lately, but there are some dizzymaker bottles heaped up next to the door hinges. His mouth twists when he sees them. Mikey is out the door before he starts insisting they leave. She doesn’t want to deal with buzzers tonight, either.

The sidewalk, the vague outline of a building, the lights--all exude this feeling of abandonment, even with the peeling green that people use to say that this is _their_ space, and it is alive, and it will not be black. The dracs register it as black, and the vixens don’t care about anything but blood, so it doesn’t get repainted until too much of the black is showing for the residents’ liking. The shade of the clouds has dropped from blue-gray to deep gray now; Mikey wants to find somewhere to spend the night before somebody else finds it and they have to sleep in the street and stand guard for each other.

x

Since they intend to keep going, the next day has to be spent haggling and swindling, a schedule patched together with fight after fight. She twists a hand into this kid's shirt anyway. "I paid for  _ edible _ food." His arm twitches just enough. Pressing him backward, she lets the guy's knife begin its arc before knocking it away from him. She doesn’t have to squeeze much more work from tired muscles before she can claw into his bag and remove a can of some excuse for meat. Mikey looks into the other face and hisses "cheat," not waiting for anything else to be said before slipping back across the concrete. She's accompanied from time to time by footsteps that don't belong, resonating wrongly with hers; they always turn out to be those of fellow stragglers hurrying perpendicularly to the way she’s going. She's more edgy when she hears them fading—there’s a constant chance they'll turn around and want her life or every tradeable on her person.

Mikey has the food ready with a small stash of tradeables, and a handful of utensils that could do as weapons. After every couple of trades, she makes a run back out of the quarter to give them to her brother to stash them. The last time she went out, he was working on climbing without using his feet.

She’s minding her own business, as always, when a guy stumbles up to this sad excuse for a stall, seemingly soaring on whatever BLI-approved substance hit his veins and took him into his own zone. Who else does he latch onto but Mikey. “Hey, hey, why is the city white?” And before Mikey can figure out how to take the sarcasm out of her plan to parrot a billboard from the Inner City (because this cage she lives in is neither pure nor generous) the high-flyer giggles to himself. “‘Cause it’s dead.”

“You’re alive and breathing on me right now,” she points out. He’s breathing on her arm while she tries to paw through different rags, hunting down the lightest texture that’ll keep the most sand out.

Very seriously, the greasy black hair nods. "But if you leave a dead animal in the desert the sun will suck out the color.”

Mikey pauses, but the man presses on as if quoting something: “Look at the clouds. These clouds are not beautiful. Rainmakers, killers. This is death of a sky.” Mikey isn’t sure if the guy is actually high or faking it. He shoves something bundled in rags into her hand before he backs off, shakes his head once, vanishes instantly in the swirl of people.

When she reaches home again, she slips between the dumpbox and the wall, head down. Unraveling the hard twine that she knows _ must _ be from the desert, she separates the wad of bandannas and looks. Two shallow metal saucers, covered in little holes and fitted with one black strap each. Lo and behold and holy shit, the stranger gave her rebreathers.  _ Two  _ rebreathers,  _ for free _ , what the fuck. Mikey decides that the guy wasn’t on the pills. Mentally, she runs through her list again, taking in the fact that she only needs some eye protection for her brother before they can leave.

She packs what she has for a few days on foot to get OUT, balancing tradeables against food against weight against  _ I'm never fucking coming back _ . She leaves the pile with her right-hand man and leaves a reminder that they're picking their names before they run away.

 

They sit quietly together that night, wondering if stories about stars are real. There's too much light pollution radiating from the Industries' buildings to see them, but after thinking for a moment, she believes the way the tumbleweeds she overhears casually mention balls of light in the night sky. 

"First part first." She looks around. "Dust, Star, Bay? Gear?"

Beside her, his head shakes lightly at all of them. 

"Party?" He considers a moment, shakes his head again, but holds up a hand.  _ More _ . 

She mentally flicks through Party Blaster, Missile Party, and Drop Party. "Party Poison?"

He nods and yawns. Breath doesn't smell too good today. Party Poison nudges her ankle with his.  _ Your turn _ . Mikey chews her lip and thinks of a face that's circulated wanted posters for weeks. She can't quite match him in case he's alive when they leave. "Kobra. Wait, Kobra Kid." 

_ Yeah _ , Poison taps against her shin. 

“I want to be a full-throttle kind of girl.” Kobra twists the sole of one shoe and thinks for about thirty seconds. Swallows. “Full-throttle kind of guy,” she lets out, just to see how it tastes. It sinks onto the filthy jacket and feels better than skin.

x

He uncurls from his bag and draws his face off of his arm. He doesn’t want to spend all day trying to hunt down people who have what he needs. Half the time, it just takes longer because word of mouth is a terrible way to spread information about goods through a tumor of a city with inexhaustible numbers of people--when one person swaps the exchanger’s name with one in another quarter, the whole telephone line tells wrong. The acid rain blowing in from the desert gives him a solid excuse. The city usually only hurts when the rain touches bare skin, but storms out of the desert have a wicked way of stinging through several layers of clothing. When Party rolls over, he notices the way the rain sounds, frowns, and shoves his face back into the crook of his elbow. 

Kobra knows he hates not being as free as he can at all times. Restriction of movement or of expressing specifics of what he wants. If he thought it would do any good, he’d save up to get them a couple of communicators, but being illiterate only makes them worthless in his hands. They have nothing to read and nothing to practice it on; they have their words, and the beats from the cobbled-together speakers of deep dark bars, but the labels they see are all pictures. The billboards are pictures. Slummers aren’t supposed to want anything more than what they have,  _ especially _ skills like reading. Party paces the uncrumpled wall of the cracked basement they stayed in last night, occasionally stretching this or that muscle group. He doesn’t really leave his track of the floor except to kick old pill packets and concrete chips into the puddle by the biggest crack in the wall between some of Kobra’s naps.

By sunset, the rain has eased off a little bit and the edge of the clouds is showing in the distance, hazy and intensely purple, but less wrong-looking. Kobra goes out to wander an almost impractically long while before settling on a small crowd of people to weasel his way into. He pushes up to the woman running the pools when his muscles are looser. 

“For starters, doll, you seem to be about as thick as a slice of tree.” The woman squints at him hard. “Then there’s the question of your family finding out, huh? And you don’t have any baby blues to put onto my blinders,” she cackles. Her fingers fumble at a pouch on her chest, freeing a cigarette as she drones on and on about what she thinks Kobra can and can’t do. The rasp of a lighter counters the voice already shuffling out from under her threadbare bandanna. His urge to interrupt her before she finishes is overwhelming. He waits the arranger out, not leaving a moment between her last word and taking that deep breath to spew everything out. “I’ve fought before, I can do this, I need to.” He turns warm hazel eyes on this woman and gets looked up and down like he’s found wanting. He’ll fucking give them a show. Every time money changes hands, it’ll be because he said so in the ring. Box. Whatever’s there. 

It’s a combination of exercise and pride that keeps him so in control. When the first opponent swings wildly at him, Kobra just tilts himself away, still close enough to feel the brush of air following the fist. The follow up squat and uppercut get him right into this idiot’s guard zone, which is so open it’s not even funny. He watches the rat stumble away in shock. He figures  _ someone _ in the ring of spectators knows he’s playing with his food, but he usually does it anyway. All the strength he’s gotten from climbing walls and using sets of jumps when he’s bored made him a better runner, a compact body with narrow, focused strength. He knows that breaking this guy will take one kick to the solar plexus. They fiddle around for another couple of minutes before Kobra decides he’s had enough; the kick drops his opponent.

After his second challenge, Kobra hears whispers and the back lines of the crowd fade out til only a smattering of people are left. These are the desperate gamblers, the lowlifes that mean that nothing else good is coming to him tonight when they aren’t swept up in a crowd. He makes a smooth exit, collecting winnings and taking the not-too-short route to where he and Party are bunked. There are twice as many vixens slinking around at night, and he’s convinced they’ll find him; on a night just like this, with money in his hand and a couple of new bruises and aches in rough places. 

It sounds like they have, feels like they have. The air isn’t quite right. He shifts to his following foot, pressing, tensing with the light steps originating behind him (they never seem to grow any louder) before black blows out into the street one down from his and he  _ goes _ . 

Kobra takes the fuck off, fresh adrenaline kicking him into a higher gear than he thought he could manage after hours of hitting things and getting hit. He’s getting away and she’s getting confused because as he started weaving through more tiny gaps between buildings, some music started spilling out of a hidden stairway. As much as he loves being able to swing into clubs for a pulse that isn’t his, it’s not worth calling the predator back out to meet him.

Something crunches to his left, a telltale buckle-against-brick. In the dark like this, Kobra can just make out someone with his belt loops getting stuck to an assortment of things on the way past the side of a shitty building, but they don't cause stumbles, scrambling, or falls. He laughs with a flash of teeth and hurtles past Kobra. "Here's a story you should forget." A hair too slowly, he recognizes him. Kobra opens his strides, feels himself gaining. He lunges into an ex-warehouse, but finds the front half empty. The back end had collapsed when the city didn’t care so much about  _ fix _ and  _ erase _ and  _ clean _ . Now it’s just scattered rubble, no rhyme or reason, which makes him appreciate it more; there is no structure in the carcass of a structure. A head of dark hair rises from some haphazardly stacked pallets. 

He hears the footsteps behind him before he sees anything, but preceding that he feels the threatening aura that the smog allows to flow to him. He totally needed another reason not to be off his feet yet. It’s not like he’s been on a chase, faked letting him get his ass handed to him, actually beat multiple people,  _ and _ wandered a whole four districts of the city. It takes next to no work to drop them (if somebody’s stance is too wide, it’s almost instinct to brat them and jam an elbow into an eye or a neck) and walk right the fuck back out.

He winds his way around to the place he left Party, shaking his head at himself internally. He can’t mentally clock out yet, but he’s fucking exhausted by how far the night has gone on and all the energy he’s pulled out of three quarters of a can of food. Fake food.

"That's not going to get you far, it's going to get you killed."

He doesn't stare, he doesn't hold his breath, or even turn around. If he’d wanted to hurt Kobra, he would have by now. 

"Divvy it up with your crew."

"Don't have a crew."

"You have a crew. Divvy it up before you get yourself jumped."

He looks now, but all he can see is the filthy toe of the guy's soft boot and a faint shadow. "So jump me. I've never had a crew, but I have a full bag and advice from someone who sounds like they want it from me."

Mildly, the voice comes again. "I got jumped when I left with a full bag and no crew. Your apparent namesake, when he left, packed too many tradeables and got jumped before he got any meds. Divide it or lighten it, kid."

He taps his toe twice on the ground as if in deliberation, then somehow slouches upward to sit on the low wall where he can be seen.

He's a wiry fucker with a bit of scruff. Kobra now sees that it hides the patches of scars between his jawline and his neck. His eyes aren't quite hard but aren't quite wide. He's clearly lost some battles and won others, not enough of either to be ground dully into the thin layer of dirt on the ground of any given alley, or a cocky asshole that gets other people beaten. 

He's a gamble that stands short. Very short. His advice is solid, yeah, yet there's a high chance he's going to run off and leave Kobra with a bag of useless shit. Roughly, he pulls his and Party's things back out, rips the liner from the bag, and fills it with the more menial items. Sorts the best into the canvas outer layer. This is how the desert whispers go, right? People doing crazy shit that fits the moment. "Make tracks."

"Stop telling me to do what I'm already  _ doing _ ," Kobra shoots back. Finished, he offers the liner to the tumbleweed. A smirk crawls across his face. “Took you a while, darling, but I accept.” 

Kobra holds out a hand, which the other man grips. “Kobra Kid.”

“Fun Ghoul,” he says, then squints up at him and mutters about “fuckin’ beanstalk snake boys.” Kobra pretends not to hear. “Where are you staying?”

“A couple minutes away. Party Poison’ll be there.” Kobra jerks his head to the south and pauses. “He doesn’t say much.”

“I’ll walk with you, but if it’s a shithole, you’re coming with me,” Ghoul warns.

  
“I’m not sleeping here,” he says with distaste. “I have a place nearby, take up as much space as you want, but. No.” He scoops up his pair of bags, then pushes one of Party’s with his foot. Since Ghoul considers it a shithole, Kobra grabs his brother and his bag and then they’re dragged across six narrow alleys (all of them uphill, the last two slick with refuse), and halfway up the side of a warehouse, which is not the best type of climbing for a body seeking sleep. Kobra had to go last, because Ghoul led the way and Party had to be guided in the new space in the dark. 

x

After what he measures as four hours of sleep, something shoves at him, not from where Party rests back-to-back with him, but the front of his shoulder. He snaps awake, holding even breathing and closed eyes until the push comes again. This time he snatches at the cause, crunching his shoulders to where his feet were situated without letting go. Party, who had stood up when he found Kobra absent, yanks him away from Ghoul’s arm and rolls his eyes so hard he can almost hear it. 

“At least you’re both awake now,” he says from the floor with slightly wounded pride. “Anyway, we’re leaving. Get your shit.”

“What do we owe you?”

“Pay me on the other side. It’s no good having your value on me if I’m dead, you feel?”

That’s fair. They shake on it, then move on to the outside. The clouds are a heavy purple today, threatening acid rain once this fog lifts a bit more. Ghoul leads them around some corners, all of the squatters clustered around the corner of the inner wall that they've been passing in front of for a week. Only one out of the four looks at them at all. A little more satisfaction floats through him. Party gives Kobra a  _ look _ . 

"Alright, I may have bratted somebody accidentally. Sort of? Uh, yesterday."

Behind his back, Fun Ghoul wrinkles his nose, to which Party responds with one eyebrow. Ghoul shrugs. "I see how it is. Don't tell the tumbleweed the freshest."   


Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Party's elbow coming toward him and opts to let it knock into his.   


He turns to find Party giving Ghoul a ridiculously overdone wink, then makes a grand  _ go ahead  _ gesture at Kobra. He hasn't seen Party flirt before, but if it involves kicking somebody in the nuts, how bad can it be? He waits for Ghoul to turn toward them, to walk backward as he had before, then swings his right foot casually between Ghoul’s legs as a sort of warning shot. Ghoul half-squawks, half-roars “stop DOING THIS.” Kobra can already tell that it’ll happen again.

He doesn’t know whether or not they should have waited a little longer and saved up for a typical guide but he’s the best they have: as Fun Ghoul had demanded of Party right before they left the lower hills, “Would you rather leave me for some Jenny-Johnny pack that can’t tell piss from water once they hit the sand?” All he has to do is lay down a hair’s width of trust. For the thousandth time today, he eyes their guide. Together he and Party could take him, if Ghoul still had all his gear on. Kobra gets the impression that he’s excessively fast.

His feet are roaring after these hours. His socks, already thin, are sliding against the grit in his boots. When he looks over to Party, his hair is plastered against his head and the desert’s open wind can’t displace it. He looks better out here with neatness than in the city with a matted scalp and no light on him. He stands so  _ straight _ . 

The first time the three of them stop is when Party grunts while trying to wrench his ankle out of a bone he crunched into. Ghoul judges a fire unsafe, but they still gather tinder: the glow-in-the-day white of dracs doesn’t glow in the dark. After ten or so minutes of breathing in the stars, Kobra can see Ghoul’s earlier restlessness rubbing off on Party. This time it isn’t Kobra that catches his attention. 

“You shits want a bedtime story?”

Party shrugs, but Kobra knows his brother is leaping in his own head.

Ghoul heaves a sigh that sounds jokingly overdramatized. “So, years ago, there was this one guy living in the Inner City. Intense topshelf complete with a pretty face and access to the works. One day his parents’ car glitches them, from some kind of malfunction that took out more than a few of the insiders, which is bullshit but I’ll argue that later—”

Party lightly nudges his foot. Ghoul blinks at him before dropping an “um” and getting back on track.

“He’s a teenager with a study in his dad’s pill bottling company, but now he’s head bitch, and doesn’t have anywhere to be. While you and I had to hunt down drinks and all that, he was doing work, but since the owner’s position was a puppet kind of deal, it gave him that spare time. Lost years were gained in days, if you see what I’m saying. He’s partying himself  _ out of himself _ and one night a tumbleweed cracks him wide open. This guy rants at him while he fades back to sober.

“And the runner’s partner witnessed the whole thing, and can cross his heart and say he saw when the world hit this guy. He didn’t want them to leave him to his own devices, in case he forgot and fell under where he’d sunk before, and when they didn’t leave, he started pulling stories of the desert out of them. It takes weeks before he soaks in all of what they gave him. He wanted to be what they were.

“Suddenly somebody on the lower side ‘miscounted’ when she registered some DShark models, right? And then, later, when the big league chew orchestrating security accidentally double-tapped the zero key while he ordered the zaps’ shots, bottler boy ended up with two full hands, you see?” Kobra snorts. “His pals laughed it off as a rookie fuckup, a story that they can wave over his head at their parties when his stockroom is full of zap charges for outdated tech. He sets aside half of the extras for when he actually leaves, and half to use in practicing until he does leave.

“It was hardly a week before a new face started waving up in the lower city. No one recognized him for shit in the slums, so they headed doubt off by claiming him a trader in from the sands to kick back and roll some heat off his shoulders. Everything he bought lined up with what someone would take back out into the horizon,” Fun Ghoul spreads his hands. “So nobody’s wrong, but nobody’s right. He doesn’t show the signs of a first-timer; he takes his time easing into the market, once a week, twice a week, slipping to four and then every day. Irregular, but careful to only get his supplies in no reliable order. He had his full stash in one of his own warehouses. The day he went to fetch it was the day of an inspection, though, and he was shit at remembering how all that went after so long off of the factory floors, so it’s messier from here.

“Eventually, he’s gotten himself stuck on top of one of the vehicles, like the obnoxiously huge ones, and his pack was up there with him. There were more dracs waiting for the main man at the front gate. Not  _ that _ main man,” he adds at Party’s concerned expression. “The factory owner, not a government guy. Anyway, this business left him stuck either way, so he waited them out,  _ all _ of them, probably by falling asleep ‘til an engine turned over, honestly. But this guy’s head was mostly sand by now, and he was going to try to pull something big just to try to prove it. So he fucking rides the truck out onto the Getaway Mile, complete with the truck’s escort, for about an hour. Arm cramps, bags poking at him, sand in his face because his rebreather was caught between some food and a bag bottom or something, I forget. He rolls to one side, pops off the motorcycles in front of him, takes care of the tail car before they know what’s going on, and shoots in the window of his ride after they pass the first cycle that dusted out. 

“He drove himself out, in loops, to the doc’s place. This was before the wheelchair thing, so when the radioman went out to look at what he assumed was a regular rubberburner, he finds this guy and almost shits himself. Think about what he saw though: some ‘slicker still dressed in his whites, pulling up in a white ride, with white zaps. I woulda had a heart attack.”

Kobra takes a minute to absorb it. He likes the story, and hopes that Ghoul isn’t just pulling a joke.

Ghoul scratches one of his arms absentmindedly. “Sometimes when I remember all this business I feel like I built an ostentatious guy to watch, out of boredom alone.”

When he looks over, Poison’s eyebrows are drawn together slightly. He blinks at Kobra, then pushes his chin slightly toward Ghoul. Kobra nods. “He still kicking?”

“If Sandman died, districts of the city would be mourning him, and the tumbleweeds would be lighting off rumors of how and why. If he passes, the Sand is still here to take him back.”

They fall asleep to sand blowing around corners of their tent and Party Poison on the first watch.


	2. Two

The sun comes up before Ghoul does, but only just. Kobra somehow figured him an early riser, pegged it in the way he seemed to vibrate in his boots when they were confined to being stagnant in the city. He’s already seen two lizards skittering around. Barely twenty minutes after they stretch and collapse the tent, he watches Ghoul dig around in the side of his bag and pull out a black box. With occasional glances to the way the ground seems to flow under his own feet, he looks on as Ghoul starts twisting a handle on the side as they walk.

He almost swerves from his skin when yelling and guitars blast at them all, full volume. Party is looking at Ghoul with a weird hybrid of shock and fascination. In the city, the radios were available in shipment after shipment and sold in the street, but also tracked and signal blocked, which no one talked about until it was paid for.

He puts it away and hauls out the tent after maybe three hours, give or take a few breaks. The space is kind of tight, but off to one side, the outer layer can be propped up for shade and airflow. He stays out under the barrier between himself and the ball of radiation for a couple of hours, stretching and refining muscle groups until his shadow pools directly at his feet if he steps outside the patch of shade. When he looks back beneath the flap, the city is only a mountainous shape that peters out as it approaches the stark form of the wall. Kobra turns his back on it and takes a nap.

He's more tired than usual, probably a product of being on edge since the day before they went under the wall. He squints up to see a sun-drenched Party and gestures sloppily while he searches for a way to phrase the reason for his twitchiness. "There are so many animals. Everything moves and moves and nothing stops, especially not the sand."

When the sky tells afternoon and night, they start to press the final distance to the edge. Ghoul got cranked up about getting their speed up to city quality, but eased off their pedals a fraction when they came to a little shack.

Kobra stops. “We’re fitting in here  _ how _ ?”

Ghoul waves him off. “Bigger than it looks.”

x

Maybe for one person, it’s big enough, but three is really pushing it. It’s comfortable enough until the next day when Ghoul comes back down and says, “Dust storm,” with full-on regret. “If we go out, we’ll die from inhalation even with rebreathers.”

By what he guesses to be noon, Kobra can’t breathe anyway. There’s so much dust but there’s also humidity from the sweat, the stink of  _ human _ that the city so lacks, and it’s getting to his head. The little breeze that makes it down to where they are isn’t strong enough to formulate anything except more temptation to get up the makeshift ladder (notches carved into a post leaning against the wall closest to the trapdoor) and run out of the shed. The rebreather strap is itchy. The only exciting thing he can do is flex one hand in front of him just to watch the muscles roll and flow. There’s not enough room for him to exercise without hitting a person or a wall at every turn.

Ghoul’s radio is polka dotty even in the tiny space they’re all crammed into. But a positive is that here and there, patches of smooth sound come out into the staleness; broken phrases of alerts and hints fade in and out between broadcasts. Kobra decides the Doctor’s music is his favorite, and the wailing of the windstorm outside can’t cover him up.

Every time he slants his eyes in Party’s direction, one of his boots (or his hand, or his head) is keeping steady with the beat of the music regardless of how strong the radio signal is. They have no light source active, because Ghoul either fuckin’ forgot, or decided that in the darkness of a sandstorm, it’s not worth it, Kobra can’t quite tell yet.

Party is slouched so far into the wall that he could probably be the wall if he really felt like it. He looks like he  _ belongs _ out here, knee deep in beats at all times. Kobra thinks that even with all they’ll have to adjust to, they deserve the desert.

x

When his eyes are too close to clanging shut out of boredom, the noise decreases.

The outside world has died down, but the ways across the sand outside are still no more distinguishable to him than before. Ghoul somehow figures out where they have to go to get wherever they’re going.

Close to sundown, they can see a van parked next to a crumbling highway overpass that’s mostly filled with sand. Ghoul’s steps are meaningful, so when he misses the look they shoot each other, he carries on and they do too. Even if he tries to fuck them up, he can’t do it better than the desert could on its own. He’s their best shot either way. Kobra loses a second to considering how he’ll measure up to the reputation the station had built in his head before the van is parked. From being close like this, he can hear the bass lines peeking through the frayed parts, uncovered by lost sheet music for the rhythms, seeing the sun like they should. This is amazing. He cracks his thumbs and shakes his hands out.

When they’re all up in the same space as the vehicle, Kobra adopts Ghoul’s posture, but leaves his feet a little wider so he can sink into his reset stance, the takeoff point of his fights against people he can just tell are faster than he is. Ghoul trusts them, he knows, but he just has a thing about being quicker on the draw.

“You can stay here for a minute if you want. I’ll just be on the other side.” He leaves them in the shade afforded by the concrete to loop around to the driver’s side door.

“Hey, you, oi.”

Party looks up.

“Not you, the wiry fuck. You look like a fella that could handle some shit, huh?”

Kobra recognizes the voice as Show Pony’s, but walking toward the head poking out of the half-open passenger door gives him a hell of an image. The blue helmet ties the crop top to the dotted tights, a pink ray gun rounds out the image. He beckons to Kobra and dumps a box into his arms.

“Take this ‘round to the back.”

The box doesn’t weigh too much, but it’s bulky. He goes to open the door and the motion’s followed by a zap pointed at him, so he keeps moving behind the  _ other _ door, then abruptly opens the first to slam his fist into the wrist with the zap handle. It falls.

“Fuck,” he says. Kobra agrees. “Did you drop the box?”

He shakes his head. “Set it down.”

The man wheels a little closer to the door, looks him up and down. “Reeking of city, arentcha?”

Kobra makes a noncommittal noise.

“I’m Doctor Death-Defying.”  _ Well, shit _ . “Been a long time since I’ve seen a fast-paced stickman like yourself loping around.” His music taste fits him well.

“Something like that.”

“Next time, knock twice on the door before you open it. Pass me the box.” Kobra does. “So are you in a spot yet or just wheeling around with Fun Ghoul?”

“Wheeling. Nothing special.”

“Somethin’s telling me you’re here ‘cause he knows I have jobs that need to be done.”

He shrugs. Nothing wrong with being useful.

“You don’t say much, huh? Rest your eyeballs on Show and he’ll give you a run through.”

“What?” Show tests.

Party totally pretends not to understand when he looks over to him. For a minute, no one says anything.

“Stare if the sun baked your skull.”

Kobra bristles. He's almost in front of Party now, not quite between him and the vehicle, but Party makes no move to do anything except continue staring. He breaks eye contact to cock an eyebrow and point upward with the hand still hanging by his side.  _ When did you figure that one out? _

When Show realizes he isn’t able to talk back, he turns to Kobra once again. One of those rare times somebody actually backs off. He’s still childish, though. And on top of that, as soon as they get out of the fucking city, they have to go back.

x

He wants to look at all the people milling around the bazaar in twos and threes, but city habits die hard and some part (most parts) of him are sure that he's going to end up bratted and bleeding out if he does it too much. He sticks to looking at the backs of their heads, loud shades of red and turquoise and blonde so bright it might as well be yellow. It all clashes so horribly that it’s more  _ beautiful _ than  _ striking _ .

The first stationary thing that catches his eye is a neon orange bag of zaps. Three of them are white, one white with stickers, and one a sun-faded red. “Can I?”

The vendor shrugs.

He picks it up, points it at the ground between his boots, and sets it down again. It’s lighter than he expects.

“They’re all DSharks, but I’ll have Deluxes inside of a month, easy.”

“Just having a look.”

She scowls. “Look with your pockets or your eyes, not your hands.”

Demon Shark zaps are fucking expensive everywhere, damn. He wonders if it’s the city or the desert that overcharges more as Party steers him back to Ghoul, who’s already talking. “It’ll take hours to get through all of this if we look at everything, so let’s keep moving. We still haven’t gotten any glasses for either of you yet.”

The glasses he finds are free—he snatches them off the ground between the moment they fall and the moment a shoe comes down toward them. The owner doesn’t miss them. To get a jacket more suited to the desert, he gives up his current jacket and a few full zap charges he couldn’t find a use for.

Kobra shoves his hands into the leather jacket’s pockets. The red is going to hold heat like a motherfucker, but it’s for his own good. There are a couple of ventilation spots lined up with his sides. Now that they’re away from the man hawking threads, he pauses to hunt for hidden pockets inside pockets while keeping an eye on the others, Ghoul having left the food runner ranting about people and their prices.

He finds one in his right sleeve and a second, larger opening by his left hip. The sleeve pocket has a little wad of wire and a couple of solar panels the size of knucklebones. They must be old, to need that much area—he wonders if they were forgotten or if the previous owner died before using them. Kobra shrugs and shoulders through the flow of people to catch up, matching strides with Party’s form. He makes a sudden stop to freeze staring at a barefoot man and the others almost slip by him. He’s a whirl of color between the lines a desert fight takes place in, but his feet are red-tan-white on the sand. It was well over a hundred degrees an hour ago; most people have have wrapped their boots twice over to keep the soles from losing thickness in the heat.

Ghoul leans over. “That’s him.”

Kobra accidentally finds himself almost drooling over the tattoos meandering from Sandman’s collarbones to his arms; he’s good-looking in the dying sun. Something jolts in his stomach. Behind him Ghoul lets out a mock-disgusted noise. “What a fucking showoff.”

Once Sandman spots their group, his (much taller) partner or whatever stops the vicious-looking play-scuffle and they talk for a minute, conversation interspersed with a low but warm laugh from the shorter of the two. Party flings a glance at Kobra, who shrugs and looks away to the stall with the rack of cars. The sand in his boots isn’t keeping him grounded. The second fighter waves Sandman off to the line closest to them.

“Little shit!” Sandman calls to them. Up close, he’s scruffy in a way that makes him brighter than the light glancing off the surrounding sand. Ghoul turns around and shakes his head. “I knew you saw me. Who’s tagging along?”

“We’re the same height, you fuck.” Ghoul thumps his shoulder. “This is Party Poison and the Kobra Kid.”

Sandman raises an eyebrow. “Smart guys, if you’re finally keeping somebody new around.”

"Kobra's wisdom amounts to a swift kick to the head." Inwardly, he shrugs.

Sandman winks at him before he responds to Ghoul. "Well, at least he has his looks.”

“I’m hurt.”

“Ghoul, you get hurt when somebody ten feet away from you tries to give an older dog somethin’ pretty, all because it wasn’t your idea.”

Party lets out a low whistle.  _ Ouch _ . He moves closer to Kobra, though, sensing his discomfort with this much attention. "Temp’s dropping faster than a mixtape in the city tunnels," Sandman says, offering a hand, and Kobra thinks,  _ sold _. His voice is appealing in a low-and-even way. 

Ghoul pulls his attention away. “Are your other boys around?”

“Aw, they didn’t show this time. Bet’s babysitting them while they babysit the bar. The Gentleman wanted to come out, but Bet and Tacks convinced him to stay to prove responsibility. Or something. They’re gonna be bartenders,” he says proudly. “They know enough that I’ve had to start getting the real deal in supply instead of the city shit. The difference between desert sauce and city sauce is that the desert bottles are worth what we pay for ‘em. I think they’re starting to earn their keep better, so we’re splurging a little.”

Kobra observes the people around them and finds the taller one approaching to casually lean on Sandman’s shoulder. “Am I not one of the boys?” There’s something about him.

Sandman and Ghoul say “no” in unison, but Ghoul goes on: “You act much younger, Fool.”

Fool pouts.

That’s what it was—his name is Fool Cobra. He’s seen this face on posters every few months, grinning wolfishly under every red x and wearing them well.

Sandman reaches up to tweak Fool’s ear. “I’m going to walk them around and head to Lujah’s after.”

It starts up again when they’re out of Fool’s vicinity.

“He’s a lot more arm-waving and carrying on than when I last saw him.”

“That boy feeds off the posters,” Sandman grins. “All that energy BLI heads put into leaving them everywhere gets him rolling. He’s good people, don’t get me wrong. But all the ribbing is well-deserved.”

In the tent later on, he gives in to the idea that’s been brewing in his head and asks to hold onto the radio, which Ghoul gives to him with reluctance written all over his face. “It doesn’t work very well in this part of the zone,” he says. Party watches him wire the panels in (it’s not like he was going to use them; better to get them out of his pocket now) while Ghoul lies on his back in one corner. There’s no more noise except Kobra’s smaller screwdriver heads until Ghoul starts flipping one of his feet from side to side.

“Are you two moving with a destination, or can I go along for the ride?”

Wordlessly, Kobra hands over the new and improved radio as an answer.

From this part of the wall, the bazaar is just a little blur in the distance. They’re here to descend again, and actually stay down on purpose instead of just to get from point A to point B.  On the count of “learning to feed themselves.” Privately he thinks that they’re here to shore tunnels because if they ditch to go back into the city, nobody’s going to care beyond replacing the extra hands. The first thing he hears is “send the slickers to hack at the wall,” which is not the start he’d hoped for.

As the sun comes up again, the other working crews begin to splinter away, progress solid, but he and Ghoul are on breaks to breathe. They’ve been hitting the rock on the cleavage point that was pointed out to them with nothing to show for it.

“Party.” He doesn’t look up until Kobra walks into his space before an upswing. “You’re shaking.” He pulls him away to sit on the cooler dirt floor. “And I don’t like this angle,” he says casually to Ghoul. “It looks like chipping around the target spot would be much more efficient than, say, pounding on a point directly in the center.”

“I can see it now. I know a guy who knows a guy. He makes neat little explosions.”

They tell the first person that they’re leaving, who just shrugs at them and says that if they hire it out, they have to pay for it and it has to be done in three days. Ghoul walks backward out of the tunnel with both middle fingers out before Kobra pulls him around. He leads them west until they’re about two districts over, then they take exit 40 in and loop back to one district’s south quarter. When he gestures to another tunnel entrance, he sighs with irritation but moves back down. They stop in dead ends a few times and Ghoul opens up cracks in the floor to make his way deeper into the concrete layers.

Eventually, he gets ahead of Kobra and Party, but they can still pick out where he went above the concrete-muted sound of some kind of noisebar above them. Party eventually stops, not to breathe, but to try getting a handle on it all, Kobra thinks.

“You’re not alone,” he smiles a little and half-shoves at his chest. “‘Cause when we roll, we roll deep.” He knows Party wants to shift foot to foot, let his eyes roll over the stained pallet stacks and the faded folded-up tents beside him, but notes the self-restraint, too.

When he moves to walk on, Party is still locked in his head. He has to be more gentle. “We know where things are going, okay? We always find our way out. You have me, and on top of that, we might have Ghoul.”

At this, Party nods. Kobra knows he’ll be fine soon. They navigate two turns and come to a room simultaneously chilly and inviting, taking in the workbench that spans the room. One redhead is draped over another, both toying with wires while one is talking to the back of someone’s head, which nods from time to time.

Before they can blink again, they find Ghoul on his back and he’s standing taller than Kobra.

“Bet, get him off. I’m uncomfortable.”

Bet looks up from his place in someone’s lap to consider the display in front of him. “Huh. It looks like it.”

“One of these days he’ll be out to get you next,” he threatens.

“It's a good thing I've got you to tell me," Ghoul snipes from behind the hair. A moment later he lets out a shrill yelp of pain, and the tall one looks very self-satisfied when Ghoul climbs down with a “you’re no fun anymore.”

“These two are Bad Bet and Tiffany Smoker. I  _ was _ ,” he says pointedly. “On Jet Star’s back.”

Jet shrugs. Ghoul reaches up and bumps Kobra’s shoulder. “Kid’s a dust angel.”

Smoker looks at him appraisingly, then nods. “It’s in the way he stands.” He’s slightly thrown off by how quiet Smoker’s voice is.

“Party’s the quick one. Four steps ahead.” He doesn’t really know why he’s talking, but the others are nodding.

“Good to have you.”

“Good to have you, actually, because there’s some work just outside the wall that we need Jet’s hands for.” Ghoul bats his eyelashes.

Kobra takes a swig from his water bottle and watches the night pan out.

He’s still in there with them after Bet, Smoker, and Party have been in another room for a while.

"Party has the vibe of a gunshy kind of guy," Jet comments.

Ghoul just gives him a look, which fails because he’s still reorganizing his section of workbench. "My ass. He’s not fuckin’ afraid to get the attention of anyone trying to ignore him, I feel it. Just wait. If he talked, there’d already be fuss."

Jet finishes up and they join the others in the modestly-sized room. They’d worked out the watch rotation earlier as they choked down the contents of the cans in their hands, right before Sandman came down to sleep.

After Kobra’s turn on watch, he settles in the biggest patch of space on the floor, which is at Party’s back where he belongs. He’ll give Ghoul a nod later to show appreciation for making note of their normal layout. From the shallow end of his consciousness, Sandman is hazy and beautiful and still passed the fuck out. He lets himself have a few moments to stare uninterrupted, then fades back into sleep.

The sudden cold of Party rolling away in his sleep forces his eyes open again after the better part of an hour. He can just make out the sound of Ghoul whispering something to him.

“Party?”

He feels a hand on his shoulder and goes back to sleep breathing a little easier.

x

Someone shifts next to him. When he cracks one eyelid, Sandman is lazily studying him like he has all the time in the world. "Avoiding the wakeup call," he yawns quietly. "But so am I."

Kobra reaches out and prods his shoulder in annoyance. “Still time for sleep.”

“But you should wake Party up.”

“Party only gets up when he decides to. _ I _ have nothing to do with it,” Kobra mutters into his jacket indignantly.

“Maybe I haven’t learned that yet.”

His eyes are closed, but he rolls them anyway. Sandman’s quick hands dart out and grab his jacket, and he swears loudly enough to make Party roll over.

“Rein it in,” Jet tells them. “Both of you, or you can’t use Bet’s spare zaps.”

Sandman snorts and pillows his head on Kobra’s stomach. “But I have all the charges,” he says loftily. Kobra is exasperated, but leaves him alone—he has an excuse not to move if he’s lying on him.

“One charge is fifteen shots,” Bet tells him a bit later, then lifts a box of them from the shelf. “Demon Sharks hold up to two charges. If these don’t come back in one piece, you’re going to have a hell of a feeling the next time you see me.”

“Okay.” He’s half a head taller than Bet and could probably take him. Maybe. As he thinks about it, he’s less sure. Smoker would probably slice him cold right after.

He shakes himself out of it by the time they go get Jet. Ghoul talks first.

“One of the last times to use exit 40. You heard about the new hole before me?”

Jet looks down to the stack of books on the other side of the room, but somehow looking farther away than that. “Yeah. The guard stepped up around the time demand did. It’s one of the moving years.”

“Gonna be a 46 so the upfucks who keep sniffing around look for one through five.”

Ghoul leads them to the shell of a water tower, walking right up to the fist-sized rivets at the base. “Stay two by two once you’re in. You’ve only been through once and I don’t want to get dead-ended, so the rear is yours, front is mine and Jet’s, unless you want to split up.” He can tell the offer is superficial. They all know no one will take it.

Near a rusting pile of struts, he twists toward the ground, just like last time. He disappears completely until Kobra reaches the floor of the tunnel and hears his voice, which rings out a little more as he gets more agitated at the fact that there are “twice as many broken-off pipes as there were a handful of nights ago, why is everyone so careless” and “just because there’ll be new exits soon—”

Kobra interrupts. “So are we leaving, or…?”

There’s a twenty minute period of stepping loudly enough to echo faintly that passes before they’re under the outer edge of the wall. He keeps checking every weapon he has, and itches to check Party’s, too. The zap in his hand makes him feel less exposed, but having knives is like putting a second lock on a door. No harm done.

“We’re going to split off and make sure there’s no one behind us and no sets of boots on the road. Stay here to make sure nobody comes looking for anything.”

“This is lame as fuck,” he protests for both of them. “We can repartner and one of us can go. We’ll need to know how to do this.”

“Your second out isn’t going to be your last, so don’t worry about it.” His tone is final. Party barely moves aside an inch for him on his way out; he only moves for Jet so he doesn’t drown in all that hair. They veer to the right, and it takes about six minutes before paranoia tugs at him. New sounds are emerging from the wrong direction, goddammit. He stops at the very edge of the opening.

Party’s footsteps—not fleeing, but quietly padding towards the opening, coming closer and closer with each soft step. Kobra hears him crouch on his left.

“Looks like five dracs,” he says softly.

He pauses when the dracs are spreading across the hard dirt in an even row, big smiles strapped to their faces. The grooves of the knife hilt he reached for reflexively won’t do him any good if he’s been shot before he gets close. In a slightly uneven motion they turn to the direction they came from, and beside him, Party’s fingers creep closer to his trigger. Kobra holds a hand out.  _ Not yet _ .

Fuck, he doesn’t know if he’s ready. He heaves a deep breath, trying not to be too gusty when he releases it, and leans in again to look the other way and almost lets out a frustrated noise instead.

“There’s a fucking murder of crows,” he drops behind him. “Fast, now, go—”

He and Party have primed zaps and boots in the sand before he finishes his thought. Three of the dracs are dead before the rest turn around; Kobra only has to duck a shot from one of the crows (which hits a drac, he notes) because he watches the other takes one of Party’s charges to the face. He takes the third and fourth crows with only three wasted shots. The second crow almost pops him twice before he can mark up on it and squeeze off a lucky shot straight into its neck. Party drops the last of the dracs with only a graze on the side of his hand.

Out of the dark, the shapes of Ghoul and Jet are making their way over.

“We came running when your lights started flashing,” Jet pants.

“Check, check, check, check” he points the shut-down zap to the crow bodies first, then holds up a hand to stop words from Ghoul and Jet. “Check, check, check, check, check.”

“Glad you weren’t planning on letting them get around,” Ghoul says.

“Hope you weren’t planning on leaving us at the foot of the Mile.”

They stand still for a moment. Kobra realizes his hand is still wrapped around the zap somewhat tightly. He loosens his fingers and kicks the zaps from the two nearest bodies into the beginnings of a pile, then squats next to one of them to pat it down for charges or wires. The others move to do the same.  


	3. Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the middle gets a little filler-y. no regrets.

Ghoul slows, then falls into step with Kobra. “He rates, okay? Lighten up, we go way back. He’s got eyes for the common good, not the common ‘everything is perfect.’”

Kobra doesn’t say anything, eyes still on Jet’s back as he walks a few strides in front of them.

Ghoul grips his shoulder briefly, then walks with Party for a while before Jet turns to Kobra, taking in Party and Ghoul, and asks, “So, are they still dismissive asses at the exit? When they were working on the current one, the second I showed up, they didn’t look at me twice. It was all micros with them, the ‘who’s this clown?’ type of comments.”

“Didn’t like us much, either.”

“Think about it: a short guy, a skinny guy, and a guy who doesn’t talk. And now, you have a guy who used to be inside the white walls.”

When Kobra doesn’t show signs of closing off after that admission, Jet’s mouth turns up at the corners.

“I’m staying for this,” Jet insists.

The squat-looking man in front of him doesn’t budge. “We’ve done this before.”

“So I’ve been told at other job sites. I’m not having another thing on my conscience because one of you decides to fuck up my array so you can sell the detonation in one of the markets.”

“Listen to me—”

“No,” Ghoul says pleasantly. “We’ll be assisting him in making sure they all blow properly.”

The man cracks his jaw, and moves the grip he has on his flashlight. Jet pushes past him and starts directing people.

Ghoul and Jet set the little charges in tandem, following a list of the weakest spots from someone who was unexpectedly helpful. Party and Kobra look at the process before leaving the area with the others. When the mismatched plastic lumps blow, they’re efficient in enlarging the cracks they were meant to; there’s a set of small tremors that don’t even amount to the vibration from the various factories they’ve hit.

“Let’s get the fuck out. I don’t exactly like things here.”

“Can I meet you out there? You’re the first vaguely tolerable runners I’ve met.”

Ghoul makes a small noise of protest and kicks Jet in the shin. “You love me.”

“First tolerable runners except Ghoul,” he amends.

Kobra’s thinking about it; already he and Party have both relied on Ghoul and had his back. Party’s listening with a face that Kobra can read as almost making a decision, but not quite.

“I want to be up and running more than I am if I stay here. And you know how it goes with triple threat, Ghoul. But now they have their usual stuff twisted up with  _ growing _ up; they don’t need me as much—neither does Bet—to keep them more in line. It’s driving me further up the walls than they are.”

“Yes, okay? Yes.” Kobra couldn’t really stop himself from cutting in, but Party knew he was going to and let him do it. He must be ready to leave, and willing to let Jet Star keep up. “But we don’t have a place of our own yet.”

“It’s fine with me,” Jet says. “’Lujah and I ran without a place for a while.”

“What are you going to tell him?” Ghoul asks.

Jet shrugs and looks up at the wall. “That I wish him best of luck with his regulars, and a ‘fuck you’ to the dracs on his behalf. I’ll be coming back sooner or later to update his sound equipment, so if they miss me. Yeah.”

“Show Pony will be back with the van in a couple of hours.”

They head back into the city and part ways with Jet temporarily, brushing sand off of each other and turning their bright colors inside out. Half of him wants to slump against the wall of the nearest building; the other half is disgusted by what’s on the surface of the wall,  _ and _ bursting with obnoxious energy.

Jet comes back around soon enough with a couple of bags, so they’re just waiting on Show Pony. Very briefly—then the door of the van is hardly closed by the time there’s a foot on the gas.

Kobra looks through the darkened window as they go. Jet and Ghoul say that the overpass has been screwed since forever, so when they get to the exit, they have to drive off the side of the Mile—cut across the median space and remnants of opposing lanes to get up and around to the building that Death-Defying and Show Pony are holed up in.

“We’re in,” Show Pony calls before shooing them away to park the van at the remains of an overhang attached to the back of the building. The groan and rattle of Death-Defying’s wheelchair precedes a gravelly “Jet Star, where the hell have you been?” Kobra and the others hang back and wait for the conversation to pan out.

“I haven’t been moving very far for a while.”

Death-Defying shakes his head. “Years. Where’d you three find this tumbleweed?”

“What, you don’t remember me?”

“I remember enough.” He leads them inside.

They're not  _ settled _ , by any means, but there has been a settling. Like dust attracted to a clean surface. This traveling, this empty, it’s good for all of them. They have better knowledge of the roads and the gas stations in the zones, they earn good food, and they’re relatively decent at not getting glitched. Also, Show Pony seems a lot warmer now that Jet Star is with them, but Kobra assumes it’s a result of Jet having been out to the zones before.

It’s simple: Death-Defying will send them off with coordinates; they use the junker Jet has named “Shitty,” but calls “Bitty” within Show Pony’s hearing. If they’re on a fuel run, they throw the bandannas and the rebreathers up, the sunglasses down, and pair off to hold Peg station attendants on the wrong ends of their zaps. Whoever’s outside grabs the gas, and then they all  run. If they’re on a food run, they scoot closer to the city, snatch what they can, drop money chips, and run. And in a few days, the cycle repeats.

It’s kind of Kobra’s fault they’re going through learning to read. He’d never really considered it any kind of big deal, but the morning he admits that no, he identifies Show Pony’s bottles of chemicals by their colors and shapes, Jet is fucking outraged. Everything he says after, “I can’t have you around these bottles if you can’t fucking read them. Factory bottles aren’t labeled with  _ pictures _ , sand and sun help me,” makes Kobra want to be in another room, but he’s in the side room with Jet,  _ alone _ , and all this vehemence is only directed at him. It’s slightly terrifying.

When Party and Ghoul come back, he demands that they learn with Kobra, who, at this point, is determined to do it. He senses that Party really wants to learn, but Ghoul isn’t that enthusiastic. Jet dumps some sand on one of the tables and before Kobra gets a chance to complain about the part where he just cleaned up most of what’s been tracked in, he watches Jet’s fingers skitter across the table and shuts up.

“These are the letters, so trace them. Use both hands until you like one better, and after you make them, you’re going to sing me your ABCs, motherfuckers. And Party isn’t getting out of  it, before you two start. He’s going to draw them again.”

Party looks kind of excited about it, and if Kobra’s honest with himself, he might be, too.

Ghoul catches onto words and patterns the fastest. He helps Party, whether Jet’s looking on or not. After slaving away at the letters between the trips for two days, he’s got them on two- and three-letter words. Kobra likes it a little more when they get to sentences, but he tends to add in words when he switches from saying it to writing it. Competing with that is the mess of dots and dashes. It’s like Jet’s trying to make it harder than it has to be; at this point, he’s kind of frenzied about it (and if Kobra puts anything on the shelf for later, he’ll probably get his ass kicked for dragging his feet).

“What’s the point of the—”

“The point is you’re going to be able to read because I said so.”

This is when Ghoul turns around to add himself in. “Jet, I don’t know how much of a real reason….”

“Cry me a river and make the fuckin’ wiggles in the sand,” Jet singsongs with murderous eyes.

“I was going to say the dots,” Kobra finishes.

“Those tell you when the thing you’re saying is done. Like it separates the things.”

“Why?”

“If I say, ‘Ghoul’s eating my dirty jacket was under the chair’ all together, it’s not going to  make sense like I want it to.”

“Oh.”

A couple of days after  _ that _ , he whips out the book Party found under one of the crates of vinyls. It was more than a little sticky, but the brightness of it makes it more appealing.

“I can tell you all know enough words to understand, and the rhymes should help you somewhat. Who wants it first?”

They all sit patiently now while Party looks through the pictures (Kobra can see him tracing some of them with his fingertips), then flips back to actually read about the North-Going Zax and the South-Going Zax.

“I have a book, too,” Ghoul says suddenly. He leaves, and hands it to Jet first when he sits  again, but not before Kobra sees colors swirled in a tower-ish thing. It’s intriguing. Jet skims it with a half-smile on his face.

After they catch the rhythm of it, they burn through both Seuss books and start to dig into the reading material Dr. D pointed them to, three comic books and a bigger book about a boy in a peach that doesn’t have pictures. Ghoul, even though he wasn’t in the mood at first, seems to be having the easiest time with the words in it, but privately, Kobra thinks that the idea of talking insects (what the fuck is a  _ peach _ anyway?) comes into his own mind easily.

He wonders if the Inner City’s highbrows are allowed books, or if there’s even anywhere with a collection anywhere with more than collected stacks of data pages. A biology textbook from back in the day, or further back to the radioman’s “back in the day.”

_ Oh, the Places You’ll Go _ rests in his lap, and he stares at it dreamily until Show Pony comes in.

“I don’t think the world even looked like this,” he starts unhurriedly, and sweeps his hand over the cover again. “But I think, I think that the way this doctor guy saw it was pretty bulletproof. Whether it happened with pink plants in the ground or not.”

Kobra waves a hand and frowns at his books, trying to convey the atmosphere that his head gets more lost in than he expects. He thinks Show Pony knows, though, the same way that he can tell Party understands without needing to bring it up in conversation.

He watches Show Pony try to hold back a glimmer of something inside the helmet, one hand fiddling with the side of the visor. “You want to try Scrabble?”

"Well, it's thirteen,” Party flips Ghoul both birds once he finishes arranging his tiles. “And it's on a triple word. So it's thirty-nine, and I used a Q," he crows.

Kobra glares over the board. "Fuck you."

"Fuck you," Jet says in disbelief.

"Not my fault I can scrape all of you motherfuckers."

Kobra lifts two tiles and launches them at Ghoul's face.

"You'd better not be abusing my game," Show Pony says from the doorway, back from helping Dr. D put some tapes and CDs into an acceptable playlist for the night hours.

"We're making sure it's being treated right," he deadpans.

“He’s off the rails,” Ghoul says seriously.

Show Pony snorts and exchanges a look with Jet, like  _ none of them were on the rails to start with _ .

Ghoul barks out a wicked laugh once Show Pony leaves again to check on the mixing deck; everyone else is just resigned at this point. At the game’s end, Kobra leaves to explore the roof with a ladder he found outside the day before. He begins to ascend slowly, testing his weight and moving higher. There’s not a whole lot up top, so he makes a mental note to hunt down a big umbrella to bring up if he wants to stay longer next time.

There’s not a lot going on besides an increase in how much music they hear. Whatever new approach BLI is trying in the sand, it’s doing jack shit. The knowledge helps him relax a bit. He’s gotten better about sleeping without being too tired, or too hungry, but now something rustles near his head. He was almost dreaming, too. Groggy, he hears Ghoul curse, but mostly settles to sleep.

Kobra feels a little pang of something when he wakes up face to face with Sandman for the second time inside of two weeks. He’s sleeping shirtless this time, and isn’t as stocky as his  clothes suggested, but lithe.

He’s kind of parched, but rolls over and his body pulls him back to sleep without a fight.

Party’s still anchored firmly in whatever dream he’s having. Kobra stands in the doorway to stretch and see where Ghoul is before he makes his way across the biggest room and hops over the table in the doorway that leads to the food. Like most mornings, he settles on top of the table with his can of Power Pup and listens to Show Pony organizing the stacks of music behind the counter off to his right. Dr. D isn’t working the station right now; he’s in front of the main doors with Sandman.

“Well, if you’re meeting the Cobras, they’re here.”

Dr. D wheels behind the long barrier and Sandman takes the opportunity to jump up on Fool’s back.

“‘I mean, the sand didn’t swallow him whole,’” Sandman says in an impression of Dr. D. He’s still on Fool’s back. Fool puts up with carrying Sandman around half the time they’re in Kobra’s line of sight, and he’s afraid it’ll give Ghoul ideas about Jet. “I don’t get the idea he likes me.”

“He’s gruff with all of us, amigo,” Fool says, no twist in his words. He adjusts Sandman’s knees so they’re not poking his ribs as much. “Got to stop harboring that shit. C’mon, we’re taking off and Diamond is impatient.”

Kobra lazes around after they leave, not doing much of anything in particular. Eventually, he starts moving out all the sand that’s been tracked in, then gives up and sits on the roof. He kicks a pill bottle around and waits for it to break. It’s the old kind, from when he was a kid; sun-bleached and transparent orange with a label—all he can make out is “Steve” and “tablet twice each day”. There’s a welcome breeze fanning over his skin.

“Not really sure what they fixed until I stopped taking them.”

“What?” His head whips up and he sees Fool settling himself against the low wall created by the shape of the roof.

“I got careless and ran short. These dunes sang to me, man. Granted, it took three days for us to get on speaking terms, but the sun and the sand told me to cut the pills. I’ve been running hot ever since. The rest of the crew came after, like, a legit vision. The stars moved under me, and it felt kind of strange, like flexing your fingers after four hours on a bike. I looked around, and there was a bigass snake—swear on my life, okay—and it told me to go to that poisonous oasis down in the tip of zone five to get myself a crew.” He stops, but looks like he has something else to say. Kobra waits him out. “Now I’ve got four, sometimes a wild five other people around that have my back; mad respect for the desert, too,” he says frankly.

Kobra thinks he’s done, but his mouth opens again and someone interrupts him.

“It’s an illusion,” Future Cry smirks behind Fool. “He’s not going to stop talking.”

Fool flutters his eyelashes. “Darling, you wound me.”

“I popped up here to say that everything I can think of is done and there is absolutely nothing to do.” He hums and seats himself in Fool’s lap. “And the others are looking for entertainment, I think.”

“We could race, maybe?” They both look at Kobra with their heads cocked.

Kobra sizes him up. Fool is taller and has had his sand legs longer, but Kobra gets the feeling that he probably takes a bit to get into a rhythm. “Alright,” he agrees. They all move down the ladder, then drop jackets into a heap in favor of marking start and stop points.

He settles a long look at the finish line, and then tenses up before Future Cry shouts for them to move. Kobra keeps his strides wide and pushes off _ hard _ , keeping his body tilted low enough that he knows they could eventually be evenly matched. His lungs and legs feel like they’re charring because of this running bullshit. Kobra lets his mouth hang open as he catches his breath, expression following the lines of a snarl without heat. “You good?”

He responds to Fool with a grunt, grimace still pulling at his mouth while his heartbeat slows to normal.

“Huffing and puffing to blow me over out of spite.” Fool grins before he lightly punches Kobra’s shoulder.

After the nasty business of making himself obscenely exhausted, he’s ready for a nap.  Party’s just waking up when he comes back in and pushes his face into the blanket. If he’s imagining it, whatever, but it still smells like Sandman.

The next day they have nothing going on. He hears one “Waiting for stuff to happen  _ is _ what happens” from Jet before Jet disappears into his project under Shitty’s hood.

Kobra doesn’t know if he prefers nothing on the horizon but working on the car or the choking danger-adrenaline of knowing they’re hitting a Dead Pegasus and going to get chased for it. However the dust falls, all of it beats the way Show Pony and this Lazarus guy interact. Half of what pushes him onto the roof is the “you turn more heads than you think,” that Lazarus says to Show Pony with a ridiculously exaggerated wink that borders lewd; the other half is Show Pony glaring daggers at him until he steps out.

The roof is a little easier to breathe from. There’s nothing glaring at him except the weather. Sitting up here, watching mashed-together antennas tremble in the wind is providing a moderate amount of comfort. He stretches out languidly under the sun until the skin on his face feels tight and the desert horizon is covering up the sun with a storm forming in the south. The tang in the blasts of air and the rapidly dulling blue of the sky give him the feeling that this is a big one. The lighter mood he’s been in for the last couple of hours makes him want to brace himself pretty securely to deal with the others waiting in the doorway. “Storm’s on the way.”

“If you’d been inside you would have heard the warning.” Jet talks at the same time Ghoul does. “None of us knew where the fuck you went. Don’t do that.”

Party looks concerned, mouth drawn to one side and head ducked. Kobra sees relief wash over him before he shakes it off.

Kobra, itching for something else to do, pushes himself to come up with something useful and works his hands raw, cutting too-thin-to-be-useful rags into strips and tying them into rope with drac uniforms that are too small for any of them

“Lousy stupid goddamned bike,” he hears from the back of the building right after the yelling that follows something startling Ghoul.

Kobra goes out to the overhang, and finds him with a wrench in one hand and a filthy pair of gloves in the other. “What’re you trying to get out of it? I might be able to help.”

“Doesn't move as smoothly as it should. Gears jerk.” That sounds like it’s worth losing himself in.

They walk inside to see Party flopped on top of the huge table off to the right of the doors, sorting damaged CDs from the good stuff. “Still needs work, but it'll do better," Ghoul says when he looks to them with interest. When he turns to the room they all sleep in, Party waves for his attention, then rubs his thumb just above his eyebrow. Ghoul tries three times and really only succeeds in smearing it.

“I didn’t get it, did I?”

Party smiles crookedly at him.

Ghoul rolls his eyes at himself and lets Party walk over to grab his hand, then slap it right  onto the part of his forehead he keeps missing. He sees the streak of grease across his hand after he thanks Party and his legs make him walk away a little faster than his brain wants him to.

When metal flashes in the fading sun after a message run one day, they pull a u-turn and eventually stop. Mostly, Party stops so they can scrape whatever buried junk hunk it’ll end up being for car parts to trade off. After a few minutes poking around with the newly-picked up boards and the tire iron, though, it’s too big. This is something worth wasting time on, so they shove around until they see the  _ other _ two sides of the rectangular outline.

Party walks up and sets a hand on his shoulder and whistles, lifting his eyebrows in  _ I don’t know how the fuck you did that, but this is shiny _ . Between them is the sound of Ghoul and Jet setting up the two-way, discussing exactly how they’re going to phrase it to Death-Defying that no, they won’t be available for the next few days.

Once they’re done, he rests in the knowledge that that this is going to be a hell of a place.

It takes two long days of digging furiously with the tools that Show Pony sends Lazarus out with in the beginning of the week, just to finish clearing the base of the side with a solid door. When they hit some unyielding cracktop, warped and worn smooth by the sand, Jet throws his fist up. They all lurch toward the window and stare as the sunrise begins, then step back and survey the building neatly nested into the sand. Faded teal panels are worn soft on the free sides, and a half inch of sand coats the floor that they can see. They stomp around proudly for a few minutes.

Then they find a blindingly perfect hood. Everyone’s digging with a renewed air now.

“We are so not talking about this in front of anyone until we have to.”

This car is so beautiful that his hands want to be on that wheel and he doesn’t quite know how to drive. They immediately decide tacitly to abandon the whole “explore the diner” thing to look over the car. There isn’t much in the way of rust (why would there be, if there’s so little moisture out here, and the rain that  _ does _ fall is leached away by the top two feet of sand anyway?) but all of the tires are cracked and flat. It’s going to have a lot more leg room than Shitty does when they do Dr. D’s next fuel runs.

Everyone might be past weary right now, but so satisfied. There’s sand all over fucking everything, and it wasn’t parked flush with the concrete marker or the building—it looks like somebody pushed it this far on a no-juice-in the tank kind of day—but it’s an easy fix. Getting the parts they need will be more difficult, but working out shelter comes first. They pass a near-empty newspaper dispenser on their way inside.

Flakes of yellowed paint are scattered across the four booths in the biggest room, but the counter that divides it is shiny and untouched. The doorway to side room that’s behind the counter doesn’t have a door, and neither does the way to the kitchen. The freezer, the kitchen, and what used to be the restrooms are areas where the building is still walled in by sand. Of the four booths, one in the left corner is big enough to hold maybe six customers instead of four people.

Party is certain that he’ll get frustrated with the way the side room—breakroom—and space behind the counter always smell like coffee and sun but only yield the latter. He knows Ghoul is watching him survey the breakroom wall. He grimaces at it. The whole thing is white, floor to ceiling, with the exception of gray speckles on the tiled floor. Easily enough, he sinks to his bag and yanks one of the buckles against his thumb. He pushes the wound against the wall in an uneven stripe at shoulder height to contrast the blank, no,  _ lonely _ , chalky shades of white. Party decides this will be his soon, even if the white will force him to sleep back to back with Kobra for a long time. Blank means there is potential.

Kobra and Jet are setting up the alarm system with a new key code while Ghoul is brushing away sand that’s leaked inside over time. In his head, Party maps out what he’ll need to trade to get them some good filters for the well nested between the spots behind the diner where the freezer and the breakroom jut out. As to the car, they take off the tires first.

The next priority is to fix everything under the hood. Bartering for parts at every market is expensive and tiring, even with Party’s skill at finding what they need. They find a junker high in zone two, but second junker they peel is in better shape; they strip it down until there’s a skeleton left. Now,  _ finally _ , they have enough bits and bobs to put the engine to rights. Plus or minus a few things.

Between the now near-continuous runs for Dr. Death-Defying, Party is trying to bury his restlessness in the paint room and the books he keeps trying to trade for new material. He has had some success getting the car to interact with the parts that they’ve gotten their hands on. They all brush up on hotwiring because there’s no other way to get it going—until they can afford to gut some other start system bring it back to put it in, there won’t be any keys involved.

When they fix up the locks and the windows (except for the one behind the driver, because fuck that mess in particular) Ghoul lifts his hand from the shell of the door and wrenches the shattered plastic out of his finger, trying to cover it up with his mouth before it bleeds too much. He laughs weakly when Kobra looks up from his progress against the fine layer of grit on the car.

It’s actually got not only a key, but new tires on the way from the city by the time they paint her up with their colors.

Jet offers to drive the next run since he likes the longer drives more than the others do, but Ghoul steamrolls over him. “Buckle up, fuckers,” he says loudly over the rushing sound of the barely-opened windows.

When they get to the station that they’re going to hit, Kobra eyes him with something not unlike anxiety. “Ghoul, you work on cars, right?”

“Obviously.”

“Then _what_ _the hell compels you to drive like that?_ ”

Ghoul doesn't seem to care any more than he did when Kobra began, except he’s scowling slightly at Jet’s loud I’m-not-laughing coughs in the rearview mirror.

Party demands to drive the next time it’s just the two of them. Kobra laughs and tells Ghoul, who looks like he’s going to wait it out.

There is a bike available for the times they venture out, kept around because the trunk of the car is dented too badly (and too small) to be worth the trouble of opening it and they have to take up most of the backseat with fuel stuff. Kobra argues rotating a little bit, but he’s pleased that most of the time, the bike ends up his. He gets himself a good helmet from one of the slightly sketchy popup markets, and then the others seem to get that he’s a definite fan of the bike. Whether or not they get that part of his reasoning involves not smelling everybody else’s grimy argumentative asses is a mystery.

The bike doesn’t mean he never takes the car out, though. He and Jet weave south to the Mile, pinging off the radio station to drop off jugs of drinking water too fresh from the source to be already contaminated. Jet steps out to assist him in lugging in what they can spare from the surprisingly functional well they’ve got going, nothing much happens. It’s a pretty regular trip that’s over quickly.

They’ve done their sixth of these runs when he parks the car and blinks a few times. Hard. He left the bike for a second and now it’s beautiful—glossy red, well-polished, not a dent.

“Group effort,” Ghoul says from where he’s leaning in the doorway. Party appears behind him after a few seconds; their return must have interrupted some project, because Kobra can see smudges of watercolors (possibly blue hair dye?) all over him.

“She’s a stunner now,” Kobra approves. “What’ve you been up to?” he directs at Party, who smiles at him and tugs him into the diner, straight to the paint room and its accumulation of splashed thoughts and burnt streaks all over the pale and open walls. It feels more comfortable than imposing now. Kobra follows him to one specific corner, then sees the huge fucking spider  he’s made.

“I love it.” He squeezes Party’s hand.

“As long as I keep listing, keep moving your foot, okay? You don’t have to push them, I just want to make sure that you’re solid with the no-gas-no-crash part of what’s where before we turn the key.”

Party flips one of his hands over as he nods yet again.  _ Yes, okay, let’s _ go.

“Clutch, gas, clutch, brake, brake, gas, brake, clutch, gas….”

Kobra stops watching to draw letters in the sand with a screwdriver until Ghoul calls him over. He stops in front of the driver’s side window. “He wants you in the car for this part.” Party reaches out excitedly to squeeze Kobra’s hand once, then impatiently points his own thumb to the  backseat.

“Alright.” He folds himself into the backseat.

For a moment, Party’s confused, and then contempt fills his body, and annoyance floods his face. He knows that yes, he did grind the gears, but Ghoul is too goddamn uptight about all of this guidance shit to give him a second. It was his fourth time with the key turned, and he was fucking looking forward to the open road, and maybe excited for having Ghoul next to him, so what, one little grind (which he hasn’t done since his second time, thank you  _ very fucking much _ ). Not even a stall. The car barely hiccuped. It doesn’t really justify Ghoul taking a crack at him.

An uncertain fraction of a second passes and they stay up in each other’s space. He wants to shake off Kobra’s hand, but he knows he won’t even as he thinks it. Instead he sighs and lets Kobra steer him away from Ghoul.

When Kobra walks through the doorway after Party, he doesn’t intentionally bump Ghoul, but he doesn’t intentionally miss either. It satisfies him for the time being. “He just wants to be  careful, probably to protect both Party and his pride, but comes off harsher,” he hears Jet saying. Kobra lets that one go on the grounds that Jet knows what he’s wagging his jaw about.

By the time they’re handed the next set of information, everyone has cooled down enough not to be at each other’s throats. Jet drives with Party in the passenger seat, Ghoul right behind him and Kobra in the car for once. He feels shifty, being in the city again with pockets of shrugs and buzzers eyeing them balefully.

They stop in front of a rash of posters. Ghoul and Jet wait a bit to the side and shrugging to each other, but not interested enough to approach.

“Wanted for trespassing, vandalism, arson, theft, and assault.” And sedition, damn. “Citizens are highly encouraged to turn in any information regarding these individuals,” the poster closest to them declares. He smirks and turns to Party. “Look at that, we’re wanted for blatant truth-telling. Even if I don’t remember the arson part.”

Party snorts and looks up at the poster with his hands in his pockets. Kobra bats his eyelashes. “Am I even better than the picture?”

_ No, but _ I  _ am _ , is written all over Party’s face; he doesn’t need signs to get the message.

He hangs back and trades words with Party on the way to whatever weak med center door Jet leads them to, making up signs for each other to guess about. Ghoul quits peering at the blank surroundings before he tells them he’s going to get paint from the underground. Jet rolls his eyes, but lets him trudge away.

In the wake of the emergency room’s alarm system being quickly and thoroughly destroyed, their bags have been filled and the dracs inside are dead. Kobra had found some shots on a shelf far, far in a back room, in a package behind some huge box of painkillers; he took them after reading the (old enough to be in color) label. They take up most of the space in his bag, but a year’s supply of hormones is going to be worth the sore shoulders from carrying it.

He watches Party and Jet make ragged circles on a wall next to one that Ghoul claims, adding arrows pointing up after Ghoul explains it. All three circles are different colors, but they point and encourage in the same direction. Kobra reaches for Ghoul’s paintbrush blindly, finds it, and scrawls GOOD LUCK under a pink “show ME a BETTER WORLD” that trails off into elaborate spiral patterns. “There will be someone who can read out here one day,” he reasons.

When they leave, the fog comes in thickly behind them before they get to the exit, and even though it’s white, something about it is just  _ unclean _ .

As it turns out, Party has some kind of sixth sense (with a little practice) and can get the car to basically  _ breathe _ with him, easy as pissing Ghoul off. Kobra doesn’t—and he’s pretty sure Ghoul doesn’t, either—understand how Party is on a wavelength neither of them have hit with the machine, but they let it go and let him roll, for the most part. Party is obstinate as fuck about driving, so this isn’t even a new fight. They both walk around each other, chins proudly raised in a signal of  _ hey, you shoulda seen the other guy _ .

To Kobra, their fights feel like they take years on end; he can’t imagine what it would be like to be one of them. It’s still an unspoken agreement between him and Jet that both keep one eye on Party and the other on Ghoul. Kobra looks on as Party legs it inside, looking ready to lock Ghoul out of the diner, then realizes that standing back like this leaves him vulnerable to Ghoul’s griping. He isn’t talking yet, only staring at Party’s back, eyes flinty.

He can see that Ghoul’s not seething like before, but it’s still smoldering under his skin. At Ghoul’s expression, he clarifies—“I just wanted to check on you”—before backing off.

Once they’re inside, they sort out what goes to the radioman and what they can keep or  trade. Jet takes it in stride and offers to show him how to do the shots once he gets them out. Party winces and looks away the first time he and Kobra see Jet push the needle under his skin.

Two infinite days of ignoring each other and sidelong glances (on both sides) pass before Party walks up to Ghoul and dangles the keys in front of him, his posture shouting  _ I’m sorry _ while his hands are still. He’s open, plaintive.

Ghoul opens his mouth, closes it, opens it. Clears his throat and looks at Party levelly. “I’m sorry, too,” he says, voice a startling tone of broken under the guilt.

Party’s chest feels better without that weight on it. He and Ghoul haven’t been alone all day because he’s been helping Kobra with various tasks that needed to get done and Ghoul has been out tuning up the car for most of the day.

Later, when they’re all indoors, he says, “I heard they have more oil at the market on the border,” shouldering his bag of tradeables and reaching to Party in a gesture that he aborts as soon as he realizes he’s on autopilot. Part of him disappointed but curious, and the rest of him confused, he leaves the door and comes back in to the others when Kobra calls something about Jet and an idea.  _ Ideas are distracting _ .

"Instead of just leaving Kobra as the only one to best translate all of Party's quirks, we're gonna work out a system and we're gonna have signals of some kind. Hand motions."

Party's face lights up. He holds up his hands in a  _ wait for it _ in front of his chest, then flips Kobra off once he has everyone's attention. Jet snorts. "'Cause that's what I meant."

Almost apprehensively, Party briefly scrubs at the back of his head and reaches into his jacket pocket to remove a piece of white paper with straight lines of untidy handwriting. He flips to the back, then scrawls "here's a basic list to start with."

It takes them hours to come up with things they won’t mistake for each other at a distance, but simple enough for them to remember in a firefight, then re-check that they’re all still unique enough. Ghoul keys himself in during the second check.

He’s clearly interested if the way he hovers at the end of the booth is anything to go by. “What did I miss?”

“Some good ideas,” Jet says. “Really good. Party’s talking with his hands and we are total fuckin’ idiots for not coming up with this sooner, seriously.”

“Fucking dazzle me.” He spreads his arms and Party smiles so, so wide. He hands Ghoul the (so expensive he doesn’t know how they keep getting it) paper with the signs so he can sort of follow along, then waves Jet over to stand in front of him. Jet glances at Ghoul, then turns to hide a smile.

_ Where is Ghoul? _ Party asks, with a concentrated frown pulling at the left side of his mouth.

_ Eating jacket under a chair _ , Jet signs back.

It makes him laugh, loud and bright against his radio in the background.

They haven’t yet seen the infestation of dracs that the radioman’s been mentioning every few songs, but knowing the Cobras are around makes Jet want to check up, just in case. Almost as soon as he switches the communicator on, panicked Spanish is flowing with the sound of the radio. Mess Maker takes the other end of the line after they hear Future Cry start trying to calm Fool down.

The news has Jet and Kobra immediately on the way to the Trans Am and verbally grappling for the wheel (which Jet wins after the “you had the car to yourself yesterday” defense). They’re not quite sickeningly tense while they bank toward the zone two border again, because Ghoul skewed the acceleration so the car could rip down the cracktop. The stronger wind flowing over him makes his eyes water; in another three songs, they see the gas station and the clap in progress.

His parking job is messy, but it doesn’t matter anyway. They’re all out of the car before it’s fully stopped, lurching out to the Cobras defending themselves against all the bodies masquerading as people. “Play to your strengths,” Ghoul shouts to them over the roof of the car. “Not a good time to explore.”

Part of him feels like he’s on the highway but not moving, just watching it all zip toward him— the crow in front of him emits part of a sound before he shoots it. Off to his left, Sandman is on the balls of his feet with a zap in each hand, one of them white and pulled from a fallen maskman. Ghoul’s at his back and firing at the suits who are firing at the Cobras; he makes it his task to fire at the suits flanking Ghoul to get at Disaster Sass. She’s holding her own, more or less. He notices vaguely that Jet stayed next to him after they got out of the car.

He sees one of them aim an elbow at Party’s throat, but he dances away in time, then whips around to send it sprawling. When it refocuses, though, its zap is pointed at Kobra and there’s no time to think. He can’t step back because he’ll trip Ghoul, and the shot’s close enough that it clips his jaw and sends him into Jet’s side. Still reeling, but more upright, he hears Fool shouting curses and Sandman yelling at Diamond Shades to “fucking  _ duck already! _ ”

Before he knows it, it’s over, everyone’s hair all over the place from hitting the red line with the front windows down, or being shot at, or both. Kobra finds that he bit his lip because of the impact with Jet when he stumbles on his way to backtrack and salvage from the dead. Mess Maker and Future Cry have already gotten most of them, but he pats down three or four for charges.

When he looks up again, Fool is staggering away from where his neon hat fell. He seems too unbalanced, clumsy. Jet walks to him first, and Kobra didn’t really get hit very badly, so he goes to him rather than wait. At Jet’s shoulder, he sees Fool tracking small movements with unfocused eyes. “Light concussion,” Jet says at Kobra’s expression. “Dose Sandman up, okay? Guy took some hits.”

Jet pushes two pills into his hand and goes back to Fool. Kobra walks through what knowledge he has of the pills, trying to figure out what Jet handed to him before he reaches Sandman. Purple is blossoming on his cheekbone and chest by the time Kobra decides they’re painkillers and antibugs, probably.

“Going to scoop me up into your arms?” he asks blithely.

Sandman smells kind of gross, but it’s not like _ he  _ doesn’t, too. Kobra looks at the burn marks on his shoulder, but shrugs. “Not like you’re burned or anything,” he says with one eyebrow cocked.

“We’re both burned. So there, sarcastic.” Sandman’s still smiling at him, small and wry.

“How about you tamp it down a little with Jet’s pills?”

“I have to admit, I’m not a fan, but I’ll listen to you. You’re easier on the eyes than Jet is.” Kobra reads his hunched shoulders right before he hisses in pain. “And just think, it’s not because of the drugs.”

“Well, don’t check out yet, because I’m not done,” Kobra says. He points to Jet, who’s waving the bottle of critter-killer threateningly at someone else. Sandman stays down when he moves away to borrow the bottle, but Jet’s off setting a wrist or something, so he opts to wait next to Fool.

“How bad?” Kobra asks, sitting next to him.

“Going to be toning down the flourishes for a sec,” he says pleasantly. “But let’s talk about you, dear. Sandskipper’s got himself some eye candy,” Fool croons to him. Kobra throws him an unimpressed look. “Daresay you’ll clean up nice, too.” And Kobra belatedly thinks,  _ there’s a message in that bottle _ .

“Might be a side effect of talking before the world comes back into focus, Fool.”

He doesn’t acknowledge that. “Jackass,” he calls affectionately to Sandman. “C’mere.”

When Kobra looks away to the others, Party catches his eye and bounces his eyebrows  twice. No breaks, even from his own brother. He lets out a halfway offended groan and tries to be patient.

The next day, after the world disperses and they’re home, they get a call out of the two-way. Everyone tumbles out the door in a rush except for Jet, who said Kobra deserved a seat instead of a bike and that he’d sleep until they were home again.

Ghoul and Party sit in the front seat and wait for Kobra to find whatever it is he ran back into the diner for, Party quietly inhaling Ghoul's scent before he remembers he probably shouldn't.

Kobra realizes they’re going to be done oscillating their fine line with all these major extremes (for at least a few days) when he almost pushes the door open and freezes. They don’t see him. They don’t see him at all, because they both have their eyes closed and Party is scrabbling at Ghoul’s collar like it’ll move him further into Party’s lap than he already is. He hopes he’ll never see worse. When they look like they’re tapering off, he makes sure he produces a lot of noticeable movement and opens the door as loudly as it can be opened, banging his helmet into the handle and everything. Ghoul’s face is still red when Kobra gets in the car.

“The fuck do you need a helmet for in the backseat?”

“It’s lucky,” he states. Obviously.

They’re not fooling anyone; he sees their hands clasped in front of the armrest. He stifles a laugh at how shitty they are at hiding it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> last second addition (13 aug)  
> so 24601lesbians.tumblr.com exists now so hit me up with ideas or whatever  
> ALSO if anyone is willing to beta (for this fic especially!!!!) pretty please tell me on tumblr or in the comments <3


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